Recap: New Zealand North Island Surf & Road Trip

Thanks to those of you who followed along our New Zealand north island road trip! If you’ve read all the other posts, feel free to skip this one, but I wanted to do a full recap of the trip in case it helps anyone else with their planning. We found October to be a pretty windy month for surfing in New Zealand, but we got lucky with waves some days and we got to see and do a ton of other amazing things along the way.

This trip took two weeks overall. I flew in and out of Auckland on Air New Zealand, which I really liked. We rented a camper van from Wendekreisen (the Koru 4 Freedom van), which was on the higher end of the options available. You could definitely do it for cheaper, but we wanted extra space because we expected the weather to be pretty cold and rainy, and we thought we might end up spending a decent amount of time in the van, which we did.

The weather ended up being better and less rainy than expected, and I would do the whole trip over again in a heartbeat!

Here’s a list of the places we stopped (with links to each post to read more):

• Whangarei Falls

• Spirits Bay

• Waipu Caves

• Raglan

• Mt. Taranaki viewpoint & Hawera

• Wellington

• Tongariro, Taupo Bay, & Rotorua

• Mount Maunganui

• Hobbiton in Matamata

• Coromandel Peninsula

• Auckland

And a map of the whole route:

Thank you for reading! Onto the next adventure…

Namaste,

Cori

**It’s always a privilege getting to surf in other countries. I make sure I’m covered with affordable and reliable travel medical insurance in case anything goes wrong. I choose SafetyWing because their Nomad Insurance policy covers activities, including surfing, in 185+ countries. To sign up, visit this link.